Offspring (2009)

Perfect cast and a good story

Crappy film

An Exercise In Nonsense

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

I first heard of Jack Ketchum, whose story this movie is based off of, when I was looking at some website and it mentioned the book, The Girl Next Door. Although I haven't read it yet, his name and the book title has stuck with me, since it's suppose to be disturbing. If The Girl Next Door is as anything like Offspring, then yes it will be.After the watching the movie, (I'll get to that in a second), I did a quick search on Ketchum and got this from Wikipedia; "Later, in his teenage years, Ketchum was befriended by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, who became a mentor to him. He supported Ketchum's work just as his work was supported by his own mentor, H.P. Lovecraft." That would definitely help to explain how his unique mindset was encouraged to grow.From the first part of the movie, where the cannibal children are sitting on the kitchen counters cackling in happiness surrounded by blood and guts to the rest of the movie with them jumping out and biting people, I said out loud, "And that is one more reason why I didn't have kids."But it was so much more than kids doing that, there was also their inbred parents, along with lots of topless women, and creepy sexual encounters.If you enjoy a gore fest, this is one you'll probably want to watch, since there was lots of blood, body parts, and eating of flesh. The pulling out the the intestines was a nice touch.Movies with inbred people creep me out the most. I can handle clowns and dolls, but people with teeth missing and who only communicate in grunts, is just too close to something that could actually happen.

I hope Ketchum's book is better than this laughable cinematic yarn about a tribe of cannibals living in the Northeast woods. Periodically, the clan descends on a small town in Maine to grab a bite, if you get my drift. The plot focuses on two women and their children, one of whom is a boy who does his darnedest to stay alive and rescue his mom, and her friend and the friend's baby. Unfortunately, the director either didn't know how to work with the kid or the kid wasn't up to the job. I suspect the former. A minor subplot has the dastardly, out of control husband of the friend driving up to confront his wife about their pending divorce. He of course proves far more dangerous than the cannibals. There's one familiar face in the cast, Art Hindle, a veteran Canadian actor who plays the town sheriff. Otherwise, this is your typical generic cast. The actors playing the cannibals are so bad, it hurts. You wanna see cannibals living in the backwoods, watch WRONG TURN. Those were some scary cannibals! Skip this low-budget mess. If you want to see a Ketchum story handled with more finesse and flair, check out Lucky McKee's THE WOMAN, made a couple of years after OFFSPRING and which may be viewed as a loose followup to it.

Yes, according to one of my old contacts in Lansing, new Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder eliminated the Wolverine state's most-generous-in-America tax credits for the film industry the day after viewing Jack Ketchum's made-on-Lake-Michigan fiasco flick in the executive mansion screening room. (Snyder lives elsewhere; he only goes to his official digs to view movies on nights he has to "sleep over" in the state capital). "I may be just a nerd," his honor sniffed, "but I know a hack job when I see one."To summarize the governor's comments, which were too lengthy to repeat verbatim here, he had a problem with all of the victims in OFFSPRING being "dumber than Petoskey Stones" (which happen to be our official state lapidary fodder). "I know we in business school always made fun of the CJ (criminal justice) majors, but heck, even Barney Fife would not have died on the beach like that, let alone three officers with guns. And those killer kids were not even supposed to have any special zombie powers!" Secondly, his excellency opined, the "Second Stolen" character was built like a 13-year-old girl, so WHY did she wander the woods NUDE (except for her waist-high knife sheath belt), while she put on a surprisingly well-preserved padded bra to have sex in the privacy of her cannibal cave? And regarding all this literal self-flagellation she performed when alone in the woods: why didn't she buy something with DEET, if the horseflies were so bad?Speaking of conundrums, our self-styled Nerd Boy continued, how is it the cannibals spent most of their time trudging along the low sand dunes of Lake Michigan's Norton Shores, but whenever they looked up the camera showed the craggy outcroppings of Lake Superior (including the iconic rock formation named Miners' Castle near Munising) 489 miles away?Gov. Snyder closed by observing that the only silver lining in OFFSPRING's cloud is that Michigan is somehow standing in for Maine's Atlantic coast. "As the credits started to roll, I realized it was my civic duty to nip this movie malarkey in the bud, before some other bozo makes an equally asinine film that includes characters KNOWINGLY in our Great Lakes State Winter Wonderland."To which I might add a personal "Amen," what with the bar being raised so high recently by CATFISH and Eminem's Superbowl Chrysler ad.

"Offspring" is based on Jack Ketchum's sequel to his gruesome novel "Off-Season".It tells the story of a cave-dwelling clan of cannibals who prey for human flesh and babies along the rural Maine coastline.Years after foiling the clan's first rampage veteran cop George Peters suspects a cannibal resurgence after the discovery of a pair of slaughtered corpses.Then the family with a small baby is attacked and the fight for survival begins...Very bloody and faithful adaptation of "Offspring" with the script written by Jack Ketchum.It's loaded with graphic violence and gore including disembowellings,brain removals and even genital chewing.The villains are corny,the torture scene is quite nasty and there is even a small cameo by Jack Ketchum."Offspring" is not as good as "Red" or "The Lost",but it's more gory and violent.8 out of 10.